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Members of the New York Police Department turned out in force on Thursday for the funeral of Officer Michael Williams in LaGrangeville, N.Y. Mr. Williams, a 25-year-old rookie officer, died on Sunday when a Police Department van crashed in the Bronx.

Martin Kleinman grew up in the Bronx. In 1984, he and wife, Ronni Stolzenberg, were living in Jackson Heights, Queens. They wanted to start a family, but were concerned about crime in their neighborhood.

The couple decided to move to Park Slope in Brooklyn — a decision not lauded by his grandmother.

“She literally looked at us like we were going to a death camp,” said Mr. Kleinman, 63. “She said, ‘Why are you going to Brooklyn? You’re going to go off and get killed.’”

That didn’t happen, and his family flourished along with the neighborhood. But Mr. Kleinman and Mrs. Stolzenberg moved out of the neighborhood — and its borough — four years ago.

“We’re solidly middle class by New York standards, but the people moving in had massive sums of money,” Mr. Kleinman said of Park Slope. “Twenty-five years younger than us and they have untold wealth.”

The couple left the three-bedroom, three-bath co-op where they raised a son together for another three-bedroom, three-bath co-op — this one, in the Bronx.

“The people are a lot sweeter,” Mr. Kleinman said of his neighbors in Riverdale. “In Park Slope, especially with the young’uns, there’s an edge. They’re really hard; very focused and strivers.”

In addition to the people and the price, Mr. Kleinman, a communications strategist and writer who works from home, said he likes the green space of his new neighborhood and the ease with which he can get to Manhattan — either by car, bus or the Metro North.

“What we miss is having a shopping street, like Fifth Avenue,” in Park Slope, he said.

He does not miss the electrical misfortunes that often befall old buildings, like the one he lived in while there.

“Here, we can do the hairdryer and the microwave at the same time,” he said.

Mr. Kleinman said in an email that he still loves Park Slope and the friends he has there.

“But what I love is the Park Slope I remember, the Park Slope of my 30s and 40s, not the Park Slope of today,” he said. “When I visit, it’s bittersweet.”

It’s called a fisher, an oversized member of the weasel family, and according to a zoologist who has been tracking fishers for years, it is the first one seen in New York City in modern times.

Fishers are black and lushly furry; the males can weigh up to 13 pounds. They were hunted and trapped to extirpation in the city hundreds of years ago.

At dawn on April 15, a city police officer, Derek Lenart, was on patrol near Bronx Community College in University Heights when when he saw an animal dart in front of him on the road and run beneath parked cars.

Before it disappeared up a driveway and into a backyard, Officer Lenart snapped a picture. The zoologist, Roland Kays, who wrote a series for The Times about his work with fishers near Albany, identified it from the photo.

People have nothing to fear from fishers, but rats and squirrels do: They are keen predators and agile climbers. (Fishers are also widely reputed to kill cats. Dr. Kays is skeptical about this, but federal wildlife officials concluded that they at least kill lynxes — see page 10 of this report.)

Dr. Kays told the story of the Bronx fisher in a blog post for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, his current employer.

He writes:

This fisher was probably looking for a place to hide for the day, either down a hole or up a big tree. Judging from the picture this a male fisher, likely a dispersing animal looking for a female and a new place to settle down. If he can find a place to sleep and something to eat he might stick around. Bronx squirrels would make good fisher prey, but things could get really interesting if fishers start hunting rats in New York.

Update, 4:27 p.m. | Professor Kays held a Google Hangout Wednesday afternoon about fishers. You can watch it below:

Chanting “Bring back our girls,” dozens of congregants of the New Covenant Christian Church in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx gathered Sunday to express solidarity with the mothers of hundreds of girls who were kidnapped in Nigeria last month.Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

The Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday granted landmark status to a historic district in Greenwich Village and to the interior of the main post office in the Bronx.

The designation of the South Village Historic District had long been sought by preservationists who feared that the neighborhood’s distinctive architecture and its history would be diluted by development. The district encompasses about 10 blocks bordered by West Houston Street to the south, LaGuardia Place and West Broadway to the east, West Fourth Street to the north and Avenue of the Americas to the West. Read more…

Working to restore mausoleums at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx were, from left, Kelly Ciociola, Johanna Sztokman and Sarah Cole.

Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Even the best internships can require some degree of menial labor: answering phones, working copy machines, making Starbucks runs.

But perhaps only a historic cemetery could dispatch Ivy League students to the roof of a century-old mausoleum to clean out grime and debris trapped in the gutter.

Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx has gotten a makeover this summer from interns who crawled around mausoleum roofs, scrubbed bronze doors, pressure-washed limestone and granite monuments, and even put back the head on a statue of a woman who lost it in a windstorm. A lush 400-acre site, which dates to 1863 and is a national historic landmark, Woodlawn is the final resting place of generations of New Yorkers and celebrities, including Celia Cruz, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Herman Melville, LeRoy Neiman and Joseph Pulitzer.

On Saturday, the city renamed a section of West 162nd Street for Yomo Toro, a celebrated Puerto Rican musician and performer who played with artists like Paul Simon and Gloria Estefan.Credit Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

For all of his accomplishments and his renown in Latin American music, Yomo Toro never allowed his fame to take away from his authenticity.

Mr. Toro is credited with the resurgence of a traditional Puerto Rican string instrument called the cuatro, and for making it known around the world as he traveled and performed with the Fania All-Stars, an ensemble that showcased the musicians of Fania Records, once the largest record company for Cuban-based music. Mr. Toro also played with artists like Paul Simon, Marc Anthony and Gloria Estefan.

But right through the day he died last year, Mr. Toro remained a modest man who stayed true to his roots, his relatives and friends said, noting that he refused to move out of his Bronx home, on West 162nd Street between Ogden and Summit Avenues, in a neighborhood that his fame and wealth could have outgrown.

On Saturday, the city renamed a section of West 162nd Street at Ogden Avenue in Mr. Toro’s honor, Read more…

An archived version of a page from Real Bronx Tours' Web site that offers tourists “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO.’”Credit Screengrab

A company called Real Bronx Tours is no longer offering adventurous visitors to New York “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO’” – at least on its Web site.

On Monday, after an article on Sunday in The New York Post depicted a tour guide inviting passengers to gawk at people waiting outside a church food pantry and marvel at a park once famous for crime, the reference on the company’s site to ghetto tourism (see archived 2012 version) instead promised “a taste of the real Boogie Down Bronx.”

The Post’s article described the guide on the $45-a-ticket tour, Lynn Battaglia, pointing out St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx to her audience of mainly white Europeans and Australians and advising them, if they entered it, to “walk with a New Yorker” because even though it had been cleaned up, “maybe someone would pick your pocket” there. Read more…

The Bronx High School of Science has produced more scientific leaders than many countries, including eight Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry.

But when New York City’s premier science magnet school decided to honor its legacy, it spent more than a dozen years and $1 million on a project that had no connection to string theory or the periodic table: a Holocaust museum.

The new Holocaust museum and studies center opened Friday in the school’s basement, a testament to the single-minded dedication of school leaders and a high-powered alumni network at a time of shrinking school budgets.

Though Bronx Science started in 1938 as an all-boys school that served primarily Eastern European Jewish families in the Bronx, its nearly 3,000 students today are more likely to be Asian and come from Queens and across the city.

“Why would the Bronx High School of Science invest not in electron microscopes but in a museum Read more…

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